On Friday, September 12, at 2pm, CCS Bard will present a panel discussion featuring scholars Ed Halter, Katie Kirkland, and Pete L’Official. The conversation will center on Stan Douglas’s most recent work, Birth of a Nation (2025), and expand upon his broader practice highlighted in the exhibition. Moderated by Casey Robertson, Public Engagement Manager.
Everyone is encouraged to see the exhibition Stan Douglas: Ghostlight before attending the roundtable conversation, as visuals of the works will not be provided.
Ed Halter is a writer and curator living in New York City, and a founder and director of Light Industry, a venue for cinema in all its forms. His publications include From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games (2006), Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century (2015, with Lauren Cornell), From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader (2018, with Barney Rosset) and over two decades of writing for 4Columns, Artforum, The Believer, Bookforum, Cinema Scope, The Criterion Collection, frieze, Little Joe, Mousse, The New Yorker, Rhizome, Triple Canopy, the Village Voice and elsewhere. He has taught at Bard College since 2005.
Katie Kirkland is an Assistant Professor of Cinema at Binghamton University (SUNY). She is a scholar of contemporary experimental documentary, with particular interests in feminist, transnational, and performative practices. Her current research project examines reenactment as a tool of counter-historical imagination amidst ongoing conditions of state violence. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in publications including Film Undone: Elements of a Latent Cinema (Archive Books 2024), Feminist Media Histories, Another Gaze, The New York Review of Books, and Film Comment.
Peter L’Official is an associate professor of literature and director of the American and Indigenous Studies Program at Bard College. He is the author of Urban Legends: the South Bronx in Representation and Ruin, published by Harvard University Press, and he is a 2022 recipient of the Rabkin Prize for visual arts journalism.
Support for 2025 public programming at the Hessel Museum of Art is provided by the Thompson Family Foundation. This project is also made possible, in part, through funding from the County of Dutchess and Destination Dutchess (formerly Dutchess Tourism) and administered by Arts Mid-Hudson.
